Excerpt from "Prime Green"

Prime Green

Ecco

Chapter One

In 1958 I was on the bridge of the USS Arneb, an
ungainly naval transport ship with the lines of a tramp
steamer. LCVPs were stacked on hatches fore and aft
under mammoth A-frames designed to raise and lower them.
The Arneb had entertained kamikazes at Okinawa. Veterans
of Normandy and the South Pacific ran many of the ship's
divisions.

That quarter of 1957-58, spring in the Northern
calendar, darkening autumn in the Southern Ocean, we had
been given some kind of pass from the alerts of the cold
war. UNESCO had designated 1958 as an International
Geophysical Year and the Navy had patched together the
Arneb as America's contribution. We were tracking
electrical activity on the surface of the sun,
"sunspots" in the far south of the Indian Ocean,
southwest of the ghost whaling station on the Crozet
Islands. On board was a team of astrophysicists from the
University of Chicago. It was the last of the Antarctic
expeditions mapped out by Admiral Richard Byrd and was
known as Operation Deep Freeze III.

One day we were steaming on the northern edge of the ice
floes at the latitude where the seasonal oscillations of
the Antarctic Convergence determine the weather. The
subpolar wind warmed as it quickened, the dark blue
plain of ocean rising into spiky horsetails that here
and there showed white. The weather in the far south, I
was learning, was weird and contrary in ways that made
it differ from the Arctic. April at latitude 55 offered
a dark sapphire sky dappled with cirrus trails. Colors
were harsh and dry, without mist. Icebergs flashed on
the horizons, intensely defined yet somehow ghostly,
like hallucinations.

I was at the helm, a watch where the night hours looked
little different from day. The ocean glowed with the
same strangely referred light. As a petty officer (my
rank was officially journalist third class) I was exempt
from helm watches. In fact I enjoyed them far out at
sea. A watch on the helm on the open ocean involved
keeping an eye on the binnacle indicator, feeling the
big lumbering transport fall away under the roaring
polar wind, then bringing her back on so that the needle
showed the designated course. A helmsman got to know the
ship and its eccentricities, its stubborn lists and
rolls. If the captain or the exec had not planned some
exercise for the day, it was a soothing routine.

The formalities of the bridge were vaguely liturgical:
terse commands repeating ancient formulas in antique
language, bells, blocks of Morse code reporting weather
from the adjoining radio shack, the boatswain's whistle
at the regulation times of day. There was a sense of
everything seriously in place. Over and over, we located
and realigned ourselves in the mathematics of the
planet, forever adjusting and correcting the location of
our tuck in space and time. The ocean around us stood
for blue infinity. Time came to us courtesy of the Naval
Observatory, sifting out across the garden fifteen
thousand miles away in Washington, over which Vice
President Nixon then brooded.

Also, helm watches could be traded for other, less
diverting details in the ship's system of graft and
barter. The duty helmsman whose watch I stood would
perform some equivalent responsibility for me. With the
ship far out at sea, the helmsman's sole responsibility
was to keep the ship on course, so there was time for
daydreaming.

For the previous month or so we had been undergoing
repairs in Melbourne. In the antipodean autumn of 1958,
I spent my idle hours contemplating the moves of an
Australian Olympic fencer named Denise Corcoran, whom I
had met by carrying her foils across Hyde Park, the one
in Sydney. I had learned something from Denise, and I
was still grappling with the substance of it.

Crossing Hyde Park, Denise and I found that we were both
bound for Melbourne: the Arneb was going in for repairs
to its evaporator system; Denise was headed for hours of
swordplay in a gymnasium above the Spencer Street
railroad station, preparing for the Empire Games that
were due to start in Montreal in a few months.

I went often to watch her work in the dingy gym above
the station, even when we had settled down together (on
our free nights at least) in a mean and ugly
neighborhood at the end of the line. She was tall and
redheaded, which she told me was all wrong for fencers;
it aroused anger and spite in opponents because you
looked, as she put it, like a big gawk-people laughed.
Fencers were meant to be compact and sleek, never
outsized, overdone, or obvious, certainly not freckled
and redheaded and slightly bucktoothed like my Denise.
Nevertheless, she seemed to be their star, intimidating
the other girls. Out on the ocean, in my mind's eye, I
could still see how she used the long, strong, and
shapely legs she complained about in unexpected lunges
that ran her enemy the length of the enclosure. The
fencer's costume was particularly lacking in any sort of
glamour, but she could appear quite handsome and
provocative, planted and prepared to strike. I liked the
way the cloth of her breeches wrinkled over the taut
skin at the backs of her knees. I also enjoyed her
pretense to a complete absence of humor, which made her
a most droll comic. She used expressions like "crikey,"
"fair dinkum," and "truly." A pint made her "squiffed."

Some days, if I had a twenty-four in town, I would sneak
Denise early out of the gym, out from under the raptor
dragon gaze of her coach. This meant making our way
through the humid halls and moist saloons and
beer-polished private lounges of the vast station in
which around five o'clock each afternoon a state of
headlong societal breakdown was under way. In those days
the official bar-closing hour in the state of Victoria
was 6 p.m. (It was the bloody women, blokes
explained-they had the vote, they wanted the blokes home
for their tea.) At the same time ...